De-Zorin'ing

[Scott]

I installed Zorin Pro today, and it took all of 5 minutes for the honeymoon to end in bloodlust.

If I delete the Zorin partition and EFI\ubuntu.001 from the EFI partition, will I have removed everything? Or is it worth restoring from a pre-Linux image?

[Brian K]

That's fine or you could start by deleting the Zorin Boot Item. This will offer to delete ubuntu.001. Then delete the Zorin partition.

[Scott]

Thank you. I wasn't sure if there were other little things added and/or changed by the Zorin installer or other weird nonsense that I wasn't aware of.

[Scott]

I went on to install Fedora -- and later remove it as described above -- and now I see quite a few items on the EFI partition that are clearly left over from Zorin and/or Fedora:

- bootia32.efi
- fbia32.* files
- fbia64.* files
- fbx64.* files
- mmx64.efi
- mach_kernel
- \System directory, containing \Library\CoreServices\SystemVersion.plist

And so on. This likely isn't a complete list.

I should have simply restored over the EFI partition each time, as I originally intended. I'm going to do so now.

[TeraByte Support]

Only if you haven't moved or changed any of the other partitions since the backup, otherwise just use scripting option to manually delete things or run the tbexplo.tbs script and use the file manager in there.

[Scott]

OK, I'll cringe and ask directly: I've resized my Windows 10 partition since the backup was created. So, restoring just the EFI partition from before this whole ordeal will cause problems?

[TeraByte Support]

resizing not so much, moving, or changing signatures, yes.

[Scott]

The backup was actually taken on a different drive before I restored it to the current one, so I guess restoring is off-limits.

I just used diskpart to assign a letter to the ESP volume, and did the cleanup via the Windows command line. I also replaced BOOTX64.EFI with the copy from the backup, since it had been changed.

The only discrepancy now, comparing old and new, is with \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD, but that seems to be a normal Windows thing.

Thanks.